Well, the forum software used for Brews and Views has been challenging to keep up with. Apparently, it has become the new favorite of hackers and script kiddies, and, frankly, I have not been able to keep up with the patching. So, once again, a hacker has gotten the best of the Brews and Views forum, and the database has been pretty much hosed.

Equally unfortunate, since the demise of Bill Pierce and the prevalence of vendor-owned and other more highly moderated fora, Brews and Views had devolved into something that one or two brewers used. Occasionally.

Based on this, I have unilaterally decided to end Brews and Views after over 20 years of operation. RIP. It’s been fun.

Nick has come in from the battlefront with exciting news! The Recipator is functional once again!

He is prudently leaving things in a read-only state until he’s satisfied that the database is stable for writing, but you can read it to your heart’s content! Your recipes stored therein, my friends, are accessible once again!

Please join me in giving Nick a virtual pat on the back, and our gratitude for his work thus far and going foreward!

Well, first off, after further prodding by a certain individual to let someone help, I did one last all-out effort to find Mark Riley. Unfortunately, I think this effort bore fruit. A Mark Riley fitting the profile of what I know of THE Mark Riley (rough geographic area, rough age), passed away in 2014 at a very young age. Circumstantially, at or before the time of this individual’s passing, all maintenance and/or input to sites that I knew him to be involved in stopped. I’m pretty sure this is the same Mark Riley, and it certainly explains my inability to raise him, even through the US Postal Service. May God rest him, and I hope receipt of my letter last year did not upset any remaining family.

With that, and there being no real market value for the Recipator except as an appendage of the HBD/Brewery, I don’t think his estate would mind that someone other than me got the thing functioning on the new server – plus, I think it would be a nice legacy for him to have it active again. Secondly, the individual who has volunteered to help has pledged to do so only for the purpose of getting it back online. With all of that, work has begun on restoring the Recipator to functionality with younger, more capable hands.

Please welcome Nick Tillman to the team, and be sure to give him encouragement as he wades into another man’s code. May The Froth be with him…

Found myself with a little slack time, so back at it: file by file, line by line. Yawn. Discovered a few more things and am working on them. Hopefully, when I’m done, I will have fixed the code hygiene to the point that the next poor sap – er, “janitor” – won’t have such a difficult time with this beastie. In any case, I’m still swinging at this thing.

I was deep in the bowels of the Recipator last night, and made SOME progress; however, recipe retrieval is still not functioning. I’ll be taking an in-depth swing at the causes there tonight.

While digging through the Recipator folders on the old server. I did find a document that coughed up a mailing address for Mark Riley, which Google, Trulia, etc. says is still current. I wrote Mark a letter imploring his help. and popped that into the snail mail system. Hopefully, that will bear fruit, and the Old Master will return to put his creation back into fighting trim.

Thanks for bearing with. As I said, it is one of my priorities, but my skills in all things C are VERY rusty, and, unfortunately or otherwise, real life takes precedence over the maintenance of this thing.

…yeasty, beery-colored memories….

…of the way we were.

In looking for an email from a particular organization, I came across this 2012 response I wrote to an old HBD contributor, reader, and friend writing an article on beer and social media. (I’m leaving off the name as I did not ask permission to post their query – I actually do respect all y’all’s privacy.) To wit:

Writer: Once upon a time, HBD was the most advanced form of “social media” out there… I am writing a feature on Beer Networking for the <Identifying Info Redacted> and was curious whether you miss “the good old days” when everything took place via e-mail. How do you feel things have improved (or got worse?) My deadline is in about a week, thanks in advance.

Me: In terms of the modern-day internet, the HBD is a museum piece. Email was long ago supplanted by other web media methods. Relative to that change, there is a vast quantity of information available to brewers today with an immediacy of access with which a daily mailing list could never compete. On the bad side, little care is required due to both the wealth and the immediacy of these information sites, and the same questions are asked over and over, from site to site, and even within the same topic on a single site. The “signal to noise” ratio – a metric in which the HBD had always been top-notch – is pretty dismal in most of these new forums. Questions asked on a modern internet discussion site will usually garner tens to hundreds of answers, some very valuable, some absolute draff – and the person asking the question is left to sort it out from among the competing voices. Here, too, some sites are better than others in terms of that S/N ratio. And, unfortunately or otherwise, many of the better S/N sites are run, either openly or surreptitiously, by folks having a financial interest in what answers the poster eventually sees.

Do I miss the old days? Sometimes. It was neat to see something you had your hands so deeply into thrive. It was great to have an active role in promoting and influencing the craft as well. On the other hand, as quirky as the internet was back in the HBD’s prime time, the frequent service outages used to drive my blood pressure through the roof while, usually in a panic, I worked with its various ISPs to restore the service. Then came the onslaught of SPAM, and the moderation task became more than one person in one time zone could contain. The technologies developed and employed to combat this SPAM also, in some cases, throttled legitimate traffic. It was around this time that we began to see the traffic to the HBD dwindling, and the traffic to web-based resources begin to surge. The rest is, as they say, history…

Frankly, I miss the community that the HBD represented, but I cannot say that I find myself jealous of the continued evolution of brewing on the internet. The HBD list still exists; the server is still running, and the content generated over its ~26 year run is preserved in the archives. Occasionally, a conversation will break out on the email list and it will be alive again for a brief moment – it is much like watching the dying embers of an abandoned campfire; the remnant of a community that stayed awhile, but had to move on. Some day, those embers will grow cold and the HBD will blink out of existence – but the vast collection of information that made the HBD what it was will, I hope, be preserved.

How apt it was.

OK, enough pining for halcyon days of old. I am still working to get the Recipator back up. I know it has been a long, long time in the making, but this is volunteer work, and my personal and professional lives have been taking precedence. But, as GOT fans are used to hearing: winter is coming. And I am back in the US and at home after quite the long time.

I have a “test bed” set up on a local server running the same OS as our VPS (but without the VPS Management software and the restrictions on root access) upon which I intend to rebuild Recipator to find out where it is going awry with the VPS security model – unfortunately or otherwise, their logs are fairly useless.

In the meantime, I am investigating other modes of throwing the recipe-sharing community a bone to chew on whilst they await the freeing of their recipes from this overlong, unfairly imposed imprisonment.

And, as always, if anyone knows where Mark Riley got off to, he could probably set this ship aright in minutes, relative to my futzing around with the code. After all, writing C is not like riding a bike, and the last time I actually wrote a functioning C program was back in University, more than a few decades ago – not to mention that it’s always more fun trying to decipher someone else’s coding style…

For those of you who have been users of The Recipator, I have a question. The Recipator home page has links to the following (what I assume to be) widgets and pages:

Hydrometer Correction

Carbonation Calculator

In The Brew Kettle

Links

Can anyone tell me if these were functional on the old server? How long ago since you remember them working? The reason being: the links on the old server were pretty convoluted. In running down what the links suggest to be the path to these files, they don’t exist. Rather than wasting time chasing ghosts on the old box, I just need to know if they were actually there.

My apologies to those awaiting The Recipator – and thank you for your patience. My experience with the C programming language is decades old, and, unfortunately, time has been very tight recently – active work life and family life occasionally interfere with my volunteer life.

As stated in a previous post, I have narrowed the issue down to the user security model of our host vs. how the program was designed to execute. I have replicated the site on a local machine, and am s-l-o-w-l-y making my way through the programs to better understand their structure and intent.

Again: thank you for your patience. Just wanted to pop up a status report so that you know where I’m at.

As promised, I have spent some quality time alone with The Recipator code and the html error logs on the VPS. In this continuing saga of me vs. The Recipator, I’ve now found that the entire user model under which it is written is incompatible with the enforced (ie: I can’t change it) security model of our new host. (For those who, for years, chided me that a VPS was where the HBD belonged: told ya so!)

It will be a while longer as I now have to find a way around this problem, and then recompile the code. Bear with – I’m learning a lot about the structure of The Recipator (this is a good thing!) and I AM working to make y’all whole again.

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